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Diversity in Writing

Hey all! Things are going well here. The rainy weather finally let up and while its a little cooler than usual for July, its beautiful out. I had a nice, relaxing weekend out at my boyfriend’s. It was great to just unwind and watch TV, play video games, and sleep.

Anyway, this is a post that I’m more than tentative to write. I’ve had it rolling around in my head since May, but haven’t had the guts to actually write it. Because its true, we do need diversity in our books.

I’ve been trying to be more diverse in my books for awhile now. I could make a punch of excuses as to why I haven’t included POC in my books, but they’d be just that. Excuses. But I’ll discuss them a little anyway.

Not being aware of what you’re doing…

I think this is where most of my issue was. I didn’t realize I was making all of my cast white. There’s a lot of problems with this. The main one being that you aren’t recognizing that there are colors of skin that aren’t your own. Maybe its because you grew up in a primarily white area. Maybe its something else. But we shouldn’t be erasing entire races of people just because people that look like them aren’t as common in your area.

The world is diverse so our books should be diverse.

Fear of doing it wrong

This is my big one now. I’ve been trying really hard to include POC in my books and I think I’m doing better on that (with the exception being Never. They’ll be some character revamps in the rewrite of that one.) I’ve always been pretty good at including various sexual orientations and romantic orientations.

The one I’m really afraid of tackling? Trans* characters. I really don’t want to portray a trans* character in the wrong way or poorly at that. I’m afraid of the backlash from something like that. I mean, I know research can yield good results as can talking to actual trans* people, but I’m just not confident enough to attempt something like that yet.

We need diversity, but we need it to be done right.

In Conclusion

This is something that writers need to work on as a whole. We need to work on including characters of different backgrounds, of different races, of different sexual orientations, of different genders. But we need to work on writing the characters properly not just throwing the character into the story because you feel obligated to add that character to the story.

I’m always afraid of stepping on people’s toes, of upsetting people. I’d feel terrible if I portrayed a certain type of character in the wrong way.